Naples. "Our son was killed", the family of Mario Carmine Paciolla, the 33 year old aid worker Napoli, found hanged in his home in San Vicente del Caguán in Colombia, opposes the request for archiving made by the Rome Prosecutor's Office.
No concrete evidence of the murder: Mario's death would be linked to a voluntary act. This is the conclusion reached by the Rome Prosecutor's Office, which requested the archiving of the proceedings initiated after the discovery of the man's body in July 2020. A decision that the man's family defines as "disconcerting" and which they will oppose before the investigating judge.
“We are certain, also because of the investigations we have carried out, that Mario did not take his own life,” his parents Giuseppe and Anna Maria stated in a statement, through their lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini. The magistrates of the city had opened proceedings in which the crime of murder was hypothesized. A case that has always remained against unknown persons.
The criminal case was identified in order to be able to carry out a wide-ranging investigative activity to try to clarify the last hours of Paciolla's life, who was in the South American country as a collaborator of the United Nations for an internal pacification project between the local government and former FARC rebels and for the redevelopment of areas used for drug trafficking.
An investigation, as often happens for episodes involving Italian citizens who die abroad, made complex by the limitations related to the investigative action. The local authorities, after the discovery of the young man's body, immediately spoke of suicide. A version that however the family has always opposed, asking the Roman prosecutors to do everything possible to arrive at an incontrovertible truth about the dramatic end of the thirty-year-old.
Mario Paciolla found hanged in Colombia two years ago
Paciolla was found hanging from the ceiling of his house with a sheet on July 15 two years ago, in an apparent suicide scenario, never accepted by those who knew him well, who supported the hypothesis of a possible murder. In San Vicente del Caguán, that day, two Colombian officials of the UN intervened immediately, the local head of security and former member of the army Christian Thompson, and his boss, Juan Va'squez.
Once inside the house, the two took care, for reasons never clarified, to quickly remove objects belonging to Paciolla and to clean the room, washing the floor with bleach. Furthermore, in the presence of four police officers who passively witnessed their work, Thompson and Va' squez removed a mattress and some tools, stained with blood, throwing them in a landfill.
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In the two years since his death, investigations opened in Colombia and Italy and one internal to the UN have not been sufficient to dispel doubts about what happened. Last July, the father and mother of Paciolla, after having made an appeal to the Prime Minister Mario Draghi, filed a complaint with the Attorney General's Office in Bogota against two United Nations officials and four police officers.
Article published on 20 October 2022 - 08:23
